I need help playtesting for the 10 Decks in 10 Weeks Battle Royale! See the first section of this article for details!

ey everyone, and welcome back to Building on a Budget! This week's deck takes something old, makes it something new, because it's borrowed, and... black? But before I get into this evolution, I am issuing a call for help from all the Building on a Budget true believers!

10 Decks in 10 Weeks Battle Royale!

Do you want to see a Battle Royale between these 10 decks?

Yes! Which deck will reign supreme?

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Just get on with building more decks, you budgeteer!

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I need your help! In order to make the best Battle Royale! possible, I want to go all out – play all 10 decks against each of the other ten decks, for a total of 100 playtesting games! This is where you, the reader, come in!

If you would like to help me playtest, I am taking volunteers to spend a couple of hours playing ten straight games of Magic (one against each of the 10 Decks in 10 Weeks) using Magic Online! Here's my requirements:

You must have one of the 10 Decks in 10 Weeks built, unchanged, as per the version at the end of an article. Sorry, you have to provide your own cards for this one!

You must be able to spend 2-4 hours playing that one version of the deck against all ten of the other decks (including mirror match) from the 10 Decks in 10 Weeks experiment. All games will be best one out of one – anything more than that, and there’s no chance that this article would ever get written! Plus, 100 games is a pretty large sample size.

That's it! If you're interested in helping out, please e-mail me at BuildingonaBudget@Wizards.com—include your Magic Online screen name, the deck you'd like to play, and the times (day and time, EST) that you'd be available to play within the next couple of weeks. Thank you in advance to anyone who takes the time to volunteer for this grand experiment—let's make the best Battle Royale! that anyone has ever seen!

Little Big Black

A few months ago, Mark Rosewater was gunslinging at a high-level event, and he packed the heat of this Black Weenie deck:

This ended up being a really efficient deck, with many built-in synergies. The most among them—the interaction between Plagued Rusalka and Nether Traitor. With the two of them working in tandem, Plagued Rusalka could give any creature -2/-2 for —sacrifice the Nether Traitor, then sacrifice another creature to bring back the Nether Traitor. In this way, you ended up only losing one guy, but giving an opposing creature the ol' Enfeeblement treatment.

Even without the Rusalka/Traitor interaction, the deck is set up for some quick beats. Many of the creatures have evasion (Dauthi Slayer, Nether Traitor, Stromgald Crusader), and all of the creatures are fast, efficient weenies. There is one problem for building this deck on a budget:

This deck ain't budget.

Here's a breakdown of the prices for each of the cards in the deck, using Magic Online's seller room as a gauge:

This still puts us above budget. There are two distinct ways to go with this deck, at this point:

There are a lot of cards that cost 1-1.5 tickets each, such as Bad Moon, or Dauthi Slayer. If I start yanking out playsets of those, I can replace them with commons/uncommons that aren't necessarily as good but that can fill the role of attackers.

This is a hard decision, because Phyrexian Arena is a really powerful card—the ability to draw twice as many cards as your opponent equals more opportunities to kill them early-on in the game, since Little Big Black is the deck serving up all the threats. Likely your opponent is going to be scrambling to play catch-up with you, so the loss of a little life in exchange for the drawing of a lot of cards is a small trade-off.

In the end, I decided that the Phyrexian Arenas should go. While I would love to have them in the deck, I can't justify gutting the creature base of the deck for a card that costs a little over half of the budget of the entire deck. I also took out Phyrexian Etchings, since it is kind of slow and cumbersome.

In exchange for the Arenas coming out, I decided to try a bunch of higher-end cards that would have a game-swinging effect. If I couldn't overload in the beginning with weenies, I would drop my bombs at the end of the game and try to outright win with one or two different cards. My choices for these slots were all cards that I'd just wanted to play around with:

Roiling Horror: After my success with Fungal Behemoth and Aeon Chronicler during the 10 Decks in 10 Weeks project, I was itching to get my hands on this guy. Best suited for a mono-black deck such as this one due to a triple-black suspend cost, I figured that Roiling Horror would make a great top-of-the-curve creature. If I'm ahead by 5 life, Roiling Horror comes down as a 5/5 haste creature that turns into 10/10 almost immediately. In addition, I can suspend him to drain those last few points of life if I hit a creature stalemate situation.

Enslave: It's Confiscate for black, except better and worse. Worse, in that it can only grab creatures. Better, in that the point of damage it does is to the creature's owner. Yes, I misread it the first time I had it played on me as well—I thought that Enslave did a point to me. This is not the case—Enslave does a point to whoever physically (or electronically) owns the card, so it adds, as they say, the insult to the injury.

Twisted Abomination: A common out of Scourge—pick up that version rather than the "timeshifted" Time Spiral version. Good both for fetching lands in the early game and for coming down on turn seven (don't play it unless you have regeneration mana up!) as a huge regenerating beater in the late game.

So far, so good. There were definitely weaknesses in the deck. For one, I have no way to affect my opponent's hand. This allows my opponent to hoard removal spells or late-game bombs, making my race an uphill battle. Since black is the color of discard spells, this is easily solved. In the end, from a list of Blackmail, Coercion, Delirium Skeins, Nightmare Void, Persecute and Stupor, I end up choosing Nightmare Void as my discard spell of choice. The reason for this is simple—I want to be able to hit, with 100% accuracy, the exact spell I want out of an opponent's hand. I don't care if I get Skeletal Vampire and a Swamp with Stupor when it's that Damnation I need right here and now. The same goes for Blackmail and Delirium Skeins. Persecute is too expensive (ticket price) to fit this deck.

I also have found that Enslave hasn't been a great addition to the deck. Sure, I can grab a creature now and then, but if my opponent doesn't have something large on the board, it's a huge wasted slot that could be another fatty. In addition, Roiling Horror hasn't worked out quite like I'd hoped. It seems better suited for a deck with a lot more Consume Spirit/Drain Life effects, as a lot of my games have come down to races.

Game 9: michinmuri (B/W Life Drain) I decide to keep a one-land hand with a bunch of 2/2 guys and double Soul Spike. I don't draw another land until he has multiple Blind Hunters on the board. I do get to four quickly after that and Nightmare Void out double Soul Spike from his hand, along with Jedit's Dragoons. Unfortunately, he has too much of a start, and I lose. Record: 6-3

I've taken a few mulligans over the past couple of games, unable to reach two mana early. Roiling Horror still isn't working out well, so I decide to kill two birds with one stone—out go two more Horrors, and in come a Swamp and a Twisted Abomination (which can work as both a fatty and a Swamp, as previously stated). This should help smooth out my mana problems.

That's all the time I have for this week! Send me those e-mails if you're interested in helping with the 10 Decks in 10 Weeks Battle Royale, and give your thoughts about this week's deck in the forums. Until next week, take care!

Poor sidebar. Should we put it out of its misery?

I never knew there was a sidebar until now.

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I read that sidebar every week, as I know it contains vital information for this column!